The entire 30th anniversary print edition of the magazine would have to be devoted exclusively to HR technology in order to cover its changes and transformations since 1987. Instead, let’s focus just on the last five years, starting in 2012. Turns out 2012 was a
critical year—marking an inflection
point in HR technology: The end of one
era and the beginning of another.

Two of our industry’s giants—JimHolincheck, then a Gartner analyst,and Lexy Martin, the mother of thedefinitive HR Systems Survey—Since the mainframe era, suchshifts have come every 10 or 15years. Client/server transformedHR technology in 1989, web-basedapplications did so in 2000, and in2012, the combination of SaaS (nowcalled the cloud), the use of socialapplications in the enterprise, analyticsand mobile did so again.

Not that any of those technologies
first appeared that year. Recruiting
vendors had been offering at least

BY BILL KUTIK • HR Technology Columnist

hosted solutions (if not true cloud)
since 1995. Workday had been selling
a cloud HCM since 2006. LinkedIn,
Facebook, You Tube and Twitter had
been available and growing for years,
though except for the first, they were
mostly used by individuals.

But 2012 marked the year that
leading experts (if not always their
more harried and budget-strapped
corporate HR colleagues) agreed that
the convergence of these innovations
meant HR technology had changed
forever.

True, most large companies are
still using on-premise systems, and
many HR executives still fret about
the safety and security of cloud
systems. But that said, the cloud is
now universally recognized as the
next generation of computing. No
longer considered just a possible
alternative, it is viewed as the
only direction in which to move
forward. In the last five years,
approximately 5,000 of the world’s
largest companies have moved to
the cloud. And the rate of adoption
is increasing. No new on-premise
enterprise software has been
introduced in the last five years.

Cloud computing has achieved the
30-year goal of HR gradually taking
control of its own systems. The days of
IT owning HR technology are over.

While IT’s blessing and support
continue to be critical, HR and the
business units are in control. Ironically,
this comes at a time when they must
give up daily control to the managers
and employees using most of the
software.

That imperative has resulted in
the biggest visible change in the
last five years: the evolution of the
user experience. Five years ago,
“consumerization” of HR software
meant making it as easy to use as
Amazon. Now it means being as
intuitive and simple as a smartphone
app!

Or as Jason Averbook, founder andCEO of the new consultancy LeapGen,likes to say: “Enterprise software foremployees now needs to be as good asthe software companies use to sell toBattles raged when employeesfirst wanted to access social networksfrom their office computers, except forLinkedIn, which has been standard inrecruiting departments for years.

In the last five years alone, HR technology has moved from one era to
another. The cloud, social applications in the enterprise, analytics and
mobile are changing its course for everyone.

Whether or not companies let
the commercial networks past their
firewall, vendors quickly moved to copy
their functionality in private networks.
Just in the last five years, this has
changed two traditional software
applications completely: performance
management and learning.

Online conversations between two
people or among many is changing
performance from the long-dreaded
annual review to a continuous series
of “check-ins” between managers and
their direct reports. Private networks
are also now being used by some to
manage the work that will later be
reviewed. Those conversations are
now fully documented for reference
however long is necessary.

You Tube-like video functionality
is increasingly in the hands of every
employee—not just confined to online
course creators—and is revolutionizing
learning. Every major vendor in the
last three years has committed to
reimagining its learning management
system, and some even refuse to call it
an LMS!

While the required online sexual-harassment course and classroom-instructor-led training still have their
place, learning is now being sliced into
bite-sized pieces. Learning and training
executives now hail the five-minute
video as the perfect learning object.

Mobile, meanwhile, has skyrocketed
as a way to consume content, especially
in cities with public transportation. And
analytics—or more precisely the lack
thereof—may no longer be the greatest
source of HR guilt.

Yet there’s one thing that hasn’t
changed in HR technology over not
just the last five, but the past 30 years.
Analysts, influencers and vendors will
always be focused on, and writing and
talking about, technology innovation
long before HR executives are ready to
buy and adopt it.

That’s exactly as it should be. It’s
their job constantly to come up with
something new. As a practitioner, you
need to focus on empowering the
workforce.

So don’t fret if you haven’t even
started looking under the hoods of
the latest buzzwords—predictive
analytics, machine learning and artificial
intelligence. Very likely they won’t get
good traction until the magazine’s 35th
anniversary.